In 1948, Carl Bridenbaugh, the director of the Institute of Early American History, reported that his field was in crisis. The history of colonial America, he lamented, had been eclipsed by the attention-grabbing Revolutionary era, and nonspecialists thought that almost all of colonial history had already been written. Today, more than sixty years later, the field faces a different kind of challenge. If in Bridenbaugh’s time there did not seem to be enough history for the field to endure, today there seems to be too much of it. The history of colonial America has been nudged out of its Anglocentric...

When Juan de Oñate came in 1598 to annex New Mexico to Spain’s empire, he did not conclude treaties with the Pueblo peoples, nor did he ask them to surrender title to their lands; rather, he summoned them to acknowledge themselves as obedient subjects of King Philip II. On the king’s behalf, he laid claim to the entire country, New Mexico as well as unspecified adjacent provinces, “without limitations, including the mountains, rivers, valleys, meadows, pastures, and waters.” Oñate’s act of possession—written, sealed, notarized, and read out to the assembled Indians and Spanish soldiers—enumerated all sorts of minerals...

In 1906–1907, a Mandan Indian man named Sitting Rabbit (also known as Little Owl) created a map illustrating more than six hundred years of his people’s spatial and spiritual history.¹ In a segment-by-segment progression, Sitting Rabbit’s painting portrays the sweeping, three-hundred-mile arc of the Missouri River in what we now know as western North Dakota. The work is so big—twenty-three feet long and eighteen inches wide—that only a small portion can be reproduced here (see Plate 1).²

Size and provenance are just two of the map’s salient features. Also of note are the iconic earth lodges—domed,...

The province of San Ildefonso de Ostimuri, nestled in the foothills and cordilleras of the Sierra Madre Occidental, first emerged in colonial documentation during the mid-seventeenth century. The history of settlement in Ostimuri, with its webs of migration, commerce, and points of exchange, illustrates the production of space and the different meanings ascribed to human geography in the diverse colonial settings of northern New Spain. Ostimuri filtered into colonial nomenclature from indigenous place-names, and Spanish settlements there appeared on maps as small islets surrounded by Yoreme, Tegüima, Rarámuri, and Nevome villages andrancheríaswith deep histories of horticulture, territorial rivalries,...

The year 1740 was a difficult one for Buenos Aires, a small town lost in the vastness of the southern plains of the Spanish domains in the Americas, and for the relatively small number of settlers living in the surrounding rural areas. That year, between October and November, the Indians had assaulted the districts (known aspagos) of Arrecifes, Luján, and Matanzas,¹ but the worst was yet to come. The most violent attack began on the night of November 25, when the southern Indian chiefs (caciques) Cacapol and his son Cangapol commanded a terrible and surprising uprising (ormalón) to...

On October 29, 1790, Lieutenant Ventura Montes’s Spanish patrol escorted Chief Volante’s group of Mescaleros off their protected reservation at Presidio del Norte (modern Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico, across the river from Presidio, Texas) and onto the open and exposed southern Plains to hunt buffalo. Volante knew this territory well because Mescaleros had once controlled it, and he hoped that Spanish troops might help them reclaim it from their Comanche archenemies. Upon making camp south of San Antonio along the Nueces River in late November, Volante and his people breathed a sigh of relief. Six Mescalero women, held captive in Coahuila...

In the last two decades a great deal of research has been done in Mexico on the history of northern New Spain.¹ This flourishing period opened different perspectives from the ones generated by scholars of American borderlands studies, where missions, presidios, and mines as separate institutions dominated the historiography. New books published in Mexico gave birth to a more integral research. Northern New Spain became less exceptional and less “peripheral” than it appeared in former works. Imperial institutions and social Spanish life did not differ much from those farther south. Indians took a broader importance in colonial enclaves, which are...

In the wake of the American Revolution, the new republic alarmed its imperial neighbors: the British to the north in Canada and the Spanish to the west in Louisiana. The imperial officials especially feared the great and growing number of Americans, who expanded their settlements with a remarkable rapidity. About 3.7 million in 1790, the American population would double during the next twenty-five years. And the population was shifting westward. From just 12,000 in 1783, Kentucky’s population exploded to 73,000 in 1790 and to 221,000 in 1800. In 1793 the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Baron de Carondelet, warned his superiors...

It’s a few hours before daylight, somewhere, and there’s a commotion outside. You bolt upright out of your blankets, heart pounding in the darkness. Men are yelling to each other in a language you don’t understand. A familiar voice cries out. You grab a weapon and stumble into the freezing night, just in time to see most of the animals being driven out of your corral. In the darkness you see the outline of a young man (your nephew?) lying face down on the other side of the fence. You shout and two men on horseback wheel ’round and glare....

On May 21, 1875, seventy-two young Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Caddo, and Comanche men from the southern Plains arrived in St. Augustine, Florida. They were prisoners of war, exiled far away from their tribal homelands in order to prevent them from fighting the United States. Exhausted from a one-thousand-mile journey east via wagon, train, steamboat, and horse-drawn cart, they were brought to Fort Marion for indefinite detention.¹

Within months of their arrival, some of these young men acquired paper and pencils and began to produce images depicting their captivity, as well as their journey to Fort Marion and their pre-captivity life...

Few have ever pronounced the history of the Americas to be, first and foremost, a history of the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. Certainly, the national histories of the nation-states of North and South America do not support such a contention, but the growing prominence of Native Americans within narratives of borderlands history invites such consideration. As a generation of scholarship has now demonstrated, across multiple imperial realms, throughout centuries of historical change, and amid massive economic and demographic transformations, the Native peoples of North America not only endured the brunt of European colonization but also directed the processes...

In traditional frontier histories, America stretched east to west across continental bones. Pioneers threaded high mountain passes, crossed prairies and deserts, facing the setting sun—paying scarce attention to the deeper America that had accumulated underfoot. Frontier mythologies suppressed these lost worlds. At best, they viewed their shattered remains as curiosities and relics: fragments of a long-forgotten past that heaved up periodically from below to lend color to, at times haunt, but rarely shape our imperial, national, or regional histories.¹

Yet frontier histories buried America far less deeply than one might expect. For it was often at the frontier—that...